dansingerman - Developer IT

Offshoring: does it ever work?

- by DanSingerman

I know there has been a fair amount of discussion on here about outsourcing/offshoring, and the general opinion seems to be that at best it is difficult, and at worst it fails. I have direct experience of offshoring myself; a previous company where I was a dev manager wanted to send some development offshore, and we ran a pilot scheme to see how well it would work. Of course it was a complete failure, although it is not completely clear to me whether this was down to the offshore devs being less talented, the process, or other factors (no doubt it was really a combination). I can see as a business how offshoring looks attractive (much lower day rate), but as far as I can see, the only way it could possibly work is if you do exceptionally detailed design up front, with incredibly detailed specifications; and by the time you have invested in producing that, you have probably spent as nearly as much as if you had written the actual code locally (which I think is an instance of No Silver Bullet) So, what I want to know is, does anyone here have any experience of offshoring actually working ever? Especially if there are any success stories of it working in a semi-agile way? I know there are developers here from all over the World; has anyone worked on an offshore project they consider successful?

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Offshoring: does it ever work?

- by DanSingerman

I know there has been a fair amount of discussion on here about outsourcing/offshoring, and the general opinion seems to be that at best it is difficult, and at worst it fails. I have direct experience of offshoring myself; a previous company where I was a dev manager wanted to send some development offshore, and we ran a pilot scheme to see how well it would work. Of course it was a complete failure, although it is not completely clear to me whether this was down to the offshore devs being less talented, the process, or other factors (no doubt it was really a combination). I can see as a business how offshoring looks attractive (much lower day rate), but as far as I can see, the only way it could possibly work is if you do exceptionally detailed design up front, with incredibly detailed specifications; and by the time you have invested in producing that, you have probably spent as nearly as much as if you had written the actual code locally (which I think is an instance of No Silver Bullet) So, what I want to know is, does anyone here have any experience of offshoring actually working ever? Especially if there are any success stories of it working in a semi-agile way? I know there are developers here from all over the World; has anyone worked on an offshore project they consider successful?

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How to serve 410 from Apache rather than a 404

- by DanSingerman

On our site, we tend to remove pages a lot where the content has expired, and we want to return http status 410 rather than 404 for requests to pages (physical files) that don't exist on our server (the entire site is made up of static files). We have tried from http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/03/27/http_error_410_gone but that just breaks our entire site, serving a 410 for every request. We are using Apache 2.2.3

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Common Ruby Idioms

- by DanSingerman

One thing I love about ruby is that mostly it is a very readable language (which is great for self-documenting code) However, inspired by this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/609612/ruby-code-explained and the description of how ||= works in ruby, I was thinking about the ruby idioms I don't use, as frankly, I don't fully grok them. So my question is, similar to the example from the referenced question, what common, but not obvious, ruby idioms do I need to be aware of to be a truly proficient ruby programmer? By the way, from the referenced question a ||= b is equivalent to if a == nil || a == false a = b end (Thanks to Ian Terrell for the correction) Edit: It turns out this point is not totally uncontroversial. The correct expansion is in fact (a || (a = (b))) See these links for why: http://DABlog.RubyPAL.Com/2008/3/25/a-short-circuit-edge-case/ http://DABlog.RubyPAL.Com/2008/3/26/short-circuit-post-correction/ http://ProcNew.Com/ruby-short-circuit-edge-case-response.html Thanks to Jörg W Mittag for pointing this out.

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SOAP - What's the point?

- by DanSingerman

I mean, really, what is the point of SOAP? Web services have been around for a while, and for a while it seemed that the terms 'SOAP' and 'Web service' were largely interchangeable. However SOAP always seemed unwieldy and massively overcomplicated to me. Then REST came along, and suddenly web services made sense. As Joel Spolsky says, give a programmer a REST URL, and they can start playing with the service right away, figuring it out. SOAP is obfuscated behind WSDLs and massively verbose XML, and despite being web based, you can't do anything as simple as access a SOAP service with a web browser. So the essence of my question is: Are there any good reasons to ever choose SOAP over REST? Are you working with SOAP now? Would it be better if the interface was REST? Am I wrong?

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Twitter Search API is returning weird characters - is it more or is it them?

- by DanSingerman

We are building an app that accesses the Twitter search over JSONP. It mostly works fine, but occasionally the request returns a JSONP callback that exists of weird unparseable characters. Here is an example: http://search.twitter.com/search.json?result_type=recent&rpp=100&geocode=51.4375857,-0.1658648,1km&page=5&callback=jsonp1272532482854 (If you change page=5 to a value less than 5 in the URL it works fine) So Am I doing something wrong? Can anyone suggest a workaround?

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